Film reviews: Can Timothée Chalamet take on any role and make it his own?
Timothée Chalamet as Marty Supreme
★★★★☆
Some sports – baseball, boxing, surfing – are inherently cinematic, lending themselves to titanic narratives of physical, psychological and even metaphysical struggles. Table tennis? Not so much.
So it’s just as well, then, that Josh Safdie’s (15A) isn’t a conventional sports biopic. Opening in New York in the early 1950s, it stars Timothée Chalamet as Marty Mauser, a Jewish ping-pong maestro earning a living as a shoe salesman but determined to become World Champion.
Blessed with apparently limitless self-confidence, Marty is shocked to be beaten in the world final by Japan’s Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi), and vows to do whatever it takes to make it to Tokyo for the next World Championships and beat Endo on his home soil.
But while the bare bones of Safdie’s plot – which is very loosely based on the real-life exploits of the eccentric Marty Reisman – seem to establish a classic sports movie narrative, the story unfolds as an intense character study of a man who is so monomaniacally driven to succeed that he leaves utter chaos in his wake, in the process upending the lives of his pregnant (and married) girlfriend Rachel (Odessa A’zion), his best friend Wally (Tyler Okonma), and Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), the businessman sponsoring Marty’s career and who is married to the unhappy actress Kay (Gwyneth Paltrow), with whom Marty conducts an on-off affair.
The worst kind of narcissist is always compelling to watch, and Chalamet is wildly entertaining in the role of the brash, fast-talking hustler who has no filter and zero appreciation for the destruction he wreaks on those around him. By turns stress-inducing, brutal, tender and blackly hilarious, Marty Supreme is a wonderfully raw depiction of naked ambition, and confirmation, if any were needed, that Timothée Chalamet can take on pretty much any kind of role and make it his own.
★★★★☆
(15A) stars Sydney Sweeney as Millie, recently released from prison and desperate to find a job – any job – that will satisfy her probation officer.
A position as live-in housemaid in the Great Neck McMansion of the wealthy Nina (Amanda Seyfried) and Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) fits the bill nicely, but soon the publicly pleasant but privately volatile Nina starts to make life very difficult for Millie, issuing contradictory orders and embarking on screaming meltdowns when Millie fails to live up to Nina’s impossibly high standards.
When Millie and Andrew develop a co-dependency as they try to keep Nina’s emotional rollercoaster on the rails, the scene is set for a revenge flick that neatly ratchets up the tension with each passing scene (don’t worry if a plot twist seems a touch implausible, there’ll be another along momentarily).
One part domestic noir to two parts psychological horror, The Housemaid thrives on keeping its audience guessing as to the true nature and motives of its three principals, with Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried both very strong in the leading roles.
★★★★☆
(15A) is a documentary from Jonathan Stiasny that focuses on the artist’s creative output from the mid-1980s onwards, as Bowie recoiled from the global superstardom of his Let’s Dance period and tried to find new ways to express himself.
Not all of his explorations were as successful in breaking new ground as his previous incarnations as Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke, but the film celebrates his work with Tin Machine and his forays into rave and drum ‘n’ bass as examples of how Bowie was ‘the great chameleon of rock ‘n’ roll’ to his very last days.
Featuring contributors from a host of collaborators who worked with Bowie over the course of his career, the film only really delivers in its last 20 minutes or so, when Stiasny explores the artist’s work on the album Black Star, which found Bowie ‘writing his own requiem.’
All theatrical releases
